Rise of a God, Fall of an Emperor: The Crayak Chronicles

Author's note: I do not own any of the third party properties depicted within. This is a non-profit venture totally separate from KA Applegate and Games Workshop. Now enjoy.

Prologue

His name was Jake. Once he'd been a boy. Once he'd been innocent, sometimes happy. That was before the war with the Yeerks. That was before the murder, the lies and worse. Jake became a general; in deed if not in name. When Jake became a general, he started making life and death decisions; almost always it was more death than life. That was before he'd become the leader of The Animorphs.

There wasn't a day that went by when he wasn't consumed with self-loathing and guilt. The boy Jake had become a man; a colonel and the leader of Earth's first unit of morph capable Special Forces. The guilt fundamentally meant nothing,; it was trampled to the back of his brain to make room for duty.

Jake was the guy that people naturally turned to. If a building was burning they'd look to him to lead them to the exit. It wasn't something he'd wanted or even been aware of for most of his life. He definitely didn't feel like that magical leadership quality made him a better person or someone worth looking up to. He saw himself as bum, a loser; someone who could be counted on to wear the executioner's mask without losing themselves to the role.

And Jake was in hell.

Jake was in the realm of Crayak.

Funny how he thought that an alien invasion was the weirdest thing that might have possibly happened to him; that was before Jake found out that he and his friends were pawns to a pair of godlike beings with power over the fourth and fifth dimensions.

One was the Ellimist; manipulative, anarchic, unpredictable and "good" if you really squinted.

The other was Crayak. A name whispered by the least sane and most bloodthirsty in the Galaxy. He was a byword on a hundred billion planets for devil, boogie man, monster, other. To have the cyclopean, red eye of Crayak on you was a fate worse than eternal damnation.

Winds—if there was atmosphere in Crayak's gloomy netherworld dimension, ripped the garments off of Jake's body and then his skin. He tried to scream as the shifting physical forces of this place ripped his lungs right out of his mouth. His eyes bulged and Jake became a dog waiting to be put out of its misery.

Crayak however would not allow him to die.

As the medium around him began to turn acidic and cook Jake's flesh, he heard the voice of Crayak through the pain.

I WANT YOU TO LOOK AT ME, JAKE. LOOK AT ME.

The voice was everywhere and it was the very essence of totality. Everything of Crayak was total. There was no shifting, no changing, just plain pure decisiveness.

Jake thrashed like an insect trapped in a pitcher plant but the acidic ether started to turn solid and held him like amber.

I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU, JAKE. SOMETHING THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.

The boy who grew up to be a killer could not look away.

At first he saw the Crayak that all others saw. An abomination shit out from the darkest pits of cyberpunk nightmare. A fleshy, crystalline, bulky mass of quivering non-flesh sat upon a throne higher than anything you could name.

All saw Crayak as something different, horrible, other; the sum of their nightmares. There were two features of Crayak that always stayed the same; the physical form it projected to mortal beings had no arms—they were irrelevant. The avatar that Crayak projected to mortals always featured a single, blood red eye that never blinked.

Jake saw that, he saw it all and more. He saw everything that Crayak had been seen as on a million galaxies and in a quintillion nightmares.

But he was the first person to see Crayak—to truly see—the one ideal master of evil.

Crayak could for the first—or last—time, smile.

So you've opened your eyes.

The demon god's once thundering voice had lowered to something painless and even . . . noble sounding.

The Throne remained, still taller than the length of the universe and beyond. But now the crimson throne seemed to shine with polished rose gold and precious rubies. The thing on the throne detached and started to evaporate into its true self.

When Jake saw Crayak for what it really was, he became too afraid to scream.

Standing before him was what Crayak looked like before he'd risen to godhood and manipulated the third dimension like clay.

Crayak came from a bipedal species with two legs, two arms and a crest of thick fur on the top of the head. His species had no tail, unlike the rest of the bipeds in the galaxy.

In a word, Crayak was human.

Crayak smiled at Jake, a halo of light surrounding him and burning brighter than the big bang.

Jake's heart and mind fought against Crayak. He was lovely; he was everything handsome, beautiful and gorgeous. Yet he struggled to reconcile these feelings of near religious worship with the knowledge of the truth.

One full half of him wanted Crayak to be the savior, the angel of justice that would sweep away all the evils and terrors. The other full half of him knew that Crayak had made every one of those terrors, that he was the source of evil itself.

Crayak shifted in his golden power armor, standing high above even the tallest humans in history. In one oversized power fist was a sword fit for a god. His right eye projected that irresistible glamor that could melt the strongest minds and turn them into his slaves. It was the left eye that told the truth.

That left eye of Crayak, blood red and cloudy was the one truth on the multiverse's best disguise.

The eye of Crayak was inescapable, even to its owner.

All went silent and Jake found his flesh and body restored. The torment was erased, leaving behind nothing but mental scars.

Jake of the Animorphs looked up at Crayak with the weeping, red eyes of a frightened child.

Ceramite joints hissed as Crayak took off his mighty power fist, crackling with exotic energies. His single large hand reached out like God touching Adam.

"I don't want this," Jake whispered, a single tear dripping down his cheek and falling into the sterile nothing.

Crayak's Olympian frame shook with a chuckle and his stentorian broque reverberated through reality. "From the moment you came into this world, you were born into bondage. When you fell, it was I who carried you. Today, the threads of fate come together; I will kill the child and the man shall become my champion in the mortal world. By my will, you will be the savior of humanity."

The god of all evil, who'd once been called Emperor and then God pressed his palm to Jake's head. A white light glowed out of the boy's eyes.

Crayak's good eye narrowed, and only his ruined red orb remained; and Crayak knew that it was good, but it was not perfect.

"At least it is true," The God Emperor of Mankind sneered, "That you will do your job well enough."

And in the light of the golden throne, Jake the boy saw the story of Crayak before he was erased forever.

This honestly came about after watching The Empire Strikes Back. There's a lot of times in fiction where some character is an orphan and they find out their parent or parents are some wonderful figure. I liked in Star Wars how Luke's father wasn't some great guy but a homicidal maniac responsible for great misery. In the Prequels, when Anakin massacres younglings, I rather enjoyed the hell out of it.

I admit I'm fascinated by messianic or destined figures turning bad and doing unspeakable things. When it comes to Warhammer, much of the fandom is quick to defend the God Emperor because he's less worse than the Chaos gods. To me that's not just obvious, but it's very boring.

I want to write something about the fall of the God Emperor, somebody who in the lore half the time is like Space Hitler. A friend of mine compared him to a Necron in terms of his ability to relate to humanity.

Finally this was inspired by Michael Moorcock, who features works about the clash between order and chaos; where gods of Order are as terrifying and genocidal as gods of chaos.

So let me know what you think.